A Christian Relationalship With Creation: Towards A Sacramental Ecology
This morning I came across an excellent post my Josh Brown (who was inspired by Jordon Cooper who in turn was quoting Thomas Friedman) about how critical it is to address consumerism (and consumption) if we expect to have any impact on protecting and/or restoring our suffering environment. While Josh doesn’t dismiss the importance of the many popular eco-friendly changes people are adopting (such as using compact fluorescent light bulbs), these small gestures do not address the root causes and contributors to our current ecological situation.
I am not fully convinced that Friedman makes his case on all points, the point is that we can easily become distracted from the core focuses we should be concentrating on. Further, in our market driven culture, our best intentions can often be taken advantage of, resulting in our increased consumption. Many articulations of the eco-revolution are simply too one-dimensional and this must change.
This reminded me of my own journey in search of the relationship between ecology (including, but not limited to, the environmental issues it raises) and Christianity. As I have said in several earlier posts, I truly believe that for all the good it does, the environmentalism movement (or the Green Revolution) is simple inadequate. And yet, many Christians who want to do the right thing ecologically have no other foundation to build from.
I believe that in order for Christians to begin to adequately, responsibly and effectively play our role in the ecology movement, we must first develop a Biblical theology and spirituality in respect to Creation. It is hard for us to understand how fundamentally our worldview has been shaped and shift over the last few centuries to severe the natural relationship to Creation. Most of the Bible is written through those former lenses, and while our understanding of Scriptures is still possible, it does rob us of some of it’s depth. It what I have begun to call moving towards a sacramental ecology.
I will explore what this means more thoroughly in a future post, but I would first like to hear from you:
1. What can we do to rediscover this sacramental ecology in Scripture?
2. In what ways can we adjust out lives to embrace this new worldview?
3. Beyond individual application, what can we do as communities/churches?
